Shooting stock photos – around Ann Arbor

This week I had some time to take a few stock photos around Ann Arbor. I have a long list of possible photos I think would be good to take, so when I have some time I can check my list and see what I feel like taking. This week I focused on some companies headquartered in Ann Arbor, the Ford Presidential Library, and people getting off the bus at a commuter lot nearby.

What I did right:

– Had the list of potential photos in the first place, so I could quickly get a set to focus on. Ford library has been on my list for over a year, I knew I wanted the sun on the front of the library, but not too bright or the contrast would be too much. That afternoon was pretty good for that.

– Looked for other opportunities as they came up keeping national issues in mind, such as the traffic jam that I could see as I waited at the commuter lot.

I again started with making sure my ISO was at 100, since I was outside on a nice day, set the white balance to sunny (with change to cloudy as needed), and used shutter speed priority with 1/250 or higher. As I took the shots I checked whether I had to make adjustments to the exposure to span the full histogram and not cut out darks or bright whites.

What I should have done differently:

– Looked up the bus schedules, so I didn’t waste time waiting for buses that didn’t arrive… Didn’t even think to go inside the bus shelter, where the schedule was displayed. I found that out the second afternoon I went, having just missed the busiest bus the first afternoon…

In cleaning up the photos there is not much to do since I had good settings to start with, so mostly focused on a good caption and good keywords. I have submitted them, we’ll see how they do…

PS Update – Shutterstock took some of them, not all, but I liked them enough to submit to others, you can see Dreamstime took the highway one.